The brain is not a bag of chemical soup, and it's a mistake to try to treat complex psychiatric disorders just by changing the flavor.

Anderson’s metaphor rejects a simplistic “chemical imbalance” model of mental illness. By saying the brain is not a bag of soup whose “flavor” can be adjusted, he emphasizes that psychiatric disorders arise from complex, structured neural circuits—patterns of connectivity, dynamics, development, and experience—not merely from global levels of neurotransmitters. The line implicitly critiques an overreliance on pharmacology as the primary or sufficient intervention, while not necessarily denying that medications can help. Its significance lies in reframing treatment and research toward circuit-level understanding and multi-modal care (therapy, environment, learning, neuromodulation), and toward more precise, mechanism-based interventions than broadly altering brain chemistry.